BOSTON — With the great debate about new statistics in the NBA having taken center stage this weekend at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, there's no better time to take the pulse of basketball's version of the Moneyball era.

So are the basketball powers-that-be buying or selling this advanced information age as a movement similar to what occurred in baseball during the early 2000s? They're buying. And buying big.

That's not to say this is the reinvention of basketball — it's anything but. And as always-unfiltered former coach Stan Van Gundy said during the two-day conference featuring more than 2,000 participants, even Moneyball wasn't everything it was cracked up to be.

"(Late Baltimore Orioles coach and Baseball Hall of Famer) Earl Weaver knew about that (expletive) long before anybody started it," the former Miami Heat and Orlando Magic coach said. "(Oakland Athletics general manager) Billy Beane got a book and a movie, and Earl Weaver was doing it in the '60s."

But teams are investing more than ever in NBA number-crunchers to aid front-office and coaching efforts. Companies such as STATS have cameras canvassing every arena, shooting 25-frames-per-second to track player tendencies. Because of that, even the most old school of executives are realizing that the analytics avalanche will keep coming whether they like it or not.

"It's not like a new invention," Boston Celtics President Danny Ainge told USA TODAY Sports. "It's like a new world of people who are now involved in the game that weren't before — smart people. And so I like our group of people (with the Celtics). I love talking to them. I'm trying to teach them about basketball, and they're trying to teach me about analytics. And I think it's important, so I think it's all good."

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You won't find a more fascinating case study on this front than Ainge, whose organization has one of the most progressive analytics operations around. But, he is quick to caution against the overhyping of this growing movement that has been deemed "Morey-ball" by some. That is in reference to the co-founder of the Sloan event, which began in 2006, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey.

Ainge's right-hand man, assistant general manager and Harvard Law School graduate Mike Zarren, is one of the unofficial forefathers of the conference that is in his backyard every year. He's a bona fide rock star at the seven-year old event which was once deemed "Dorkapalooza" by ESPN's Bill Simmons.

Ainge said the Celtics currently have three full-time employees in addition to himself and Zarren whose primary focus is analytics (Dave Lewin, as Ainge noted, has duties that go well beyond analytics, as the director of scouting). First-year Celtics coach Brad Stevens widely is viewed as someone who is as receptive to — and as adept with — data as anyone in the league.

With every passing year, this sort of internal structure is far more the norm than it is the exception. And the impact of the advanced analytics is often more subtle than it is profound, a way of either supporting previously held beliefs with data or opening up new viewpoints by way of the research.

"I don't see it as that much different from when I was coaching (the Phoenix Suns from 1996 to 2000)," said Ainge, who played three seasons of Major League Baseball with the Toronto Blue Jays. "When I coached, I looked at numbers. I looked at lineup numbers. I looked at certain things. The numbers are more sophisticated, more accessible, and we have more people doing it. But in some ways, there are a lot of the same things but just different ways to get there and with fancier words and so forth.

"It's sort of like a buzzword of 'on-base percentage.' That became a big deal (during the Moneyball craze), but that was emphasized when I played baseball back in high school."

Yet as Ainge made clear, there is real meaning to be gleaned here and lessons to be learned. The key, going forward, will be the refinement of this process that is now widely seen as pivotal.

"I think that there remains great value (in analytics), and it continues to progress and improve," Ainge said. "Where we are as an organization today is much further along than we ever have been in the last 10 years. We're identifying what's relevant and what isn't, and we're continuing to improve those things that we can actually rely on and what things we can't rely on.

"You win with great players, obviously. That's the one way everybody knows how to win. But I think everybody is looking for an edge. Everybody is looking for little tweaks in the system."